Zero Point: Our 4th Industrial Revolution Against Their Great Reset

Posted on December 22, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Joaquin Flores

Genesis 1:26 – And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Humanity is on the precipice of a new dark age, a long dark winter. It is one in which the technologies once developed to liberate humanity from toil, have developed further into a seemingly insurmountable techno-industrial leviathan. This is one based upon misanthropy, slavery, and human eradication. Called the Great Reset, it is being put forth by the same as those speaking of this 4^th Industrial Revolution.

But there is another 4^th Industrial Revolution which is on the horizon, one which places mankind at the helm of liberatory technologies like the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing.

Hence, what is being termed the 4IR is in fact about subverting the actual 4IR towards the interests of the financialists whose old method of control (finance) is dwindling.

In this piece, we will attempt to shed light on two very altering visions of a 4^th Industrial Revolution. One of prosperity and individual human freedom as well as social liberty, versus one of repression and a new technocratic police state.

“The real 4th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in its garage, owning its own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm.”

Whose 4^th Industrial Revolution – Ours or Theirs?

There are two competing visions of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), and in that sense, two competing visions of a Great Reset. This is why we have posed the question in our essay Whose Great Reset? The Fight for Our Future – Technocracy vs. the Republic . Consequently, a lot of confusion has arisen about the 4^th Industrial Revolution; whether it is primarily an anthropic or misanthropic agenda.

This is chiefly because Klaus Schwab’s books ‘Covid-19 – The Great Reset’ and ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’ appropriates the language of the coming 4^th Industrial Revolution, but puts forward another practically unrelated agenda entirely. The World Economic Forum, the ‘Davos People’, is a financialist network which looks upon the coming new epoch not with optimism, but with horror.

Just as the financialist system was about externalizing costs, now we find an entire social-psychological regime of externalizing horror. The horror and uncertainty of this time is in most ways a reflection of their own. The dominating ideas of any society are the ideas of its dominating class.

The moves of Schwab (and backed by the Rothschilds and their friends in big tech, and the Deep State writ large), are all moves to contain, control, and push-back the 4^th industrial revolution into a different kind of system. This is because the technologies which the actual 4^th Industrial Revolution really involve are to the detriment of the present ruling plutocracy.

To be clear, their Great Reset will not bring about the 4^th Industrial Revolution they speak of, nor as it was originally understood. The 4^th Industrial Revolution was originally thought to be new inventions that bring great freedom, and individual initiative that automation would allow for. These would break the fetters of the old economic model and unlock the potential of the new. It would not destroy society and imprison people, but magnify the plurality of a free society and liberate people from the planned obsolescence industrial model.

The real 4^th Industrial Revolution is the economic component of the Great Awakening and the 4^th Turning.

The old society was based in mass-scale industrial production, planned obsolescence, and the societies of mass-scale requiring bureaucracies. Those old bureaucracies and societies of scale mirror, in its social relations of production, the form lent to it by the means of production.

In other words, the society of mass industry and planned obsolescence at the economic level was the foundation for a society of mass bureaucracy and meaningless work at the social level. The bureaucratic revolution of the 1920’s and 30’s which was the New Deal and the Military Industrial Complex, was seen in other parts of the world as Marxism-Leninism and Fascism.

Consequently, as we have explained in ‘Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity’, that system relied upon planned obsolescence. The goal was not to produce access to the goods produced by industry, but to continue on the cycle of production and distribution as an over-arching control paradigm. This was to have people going to work every-day.

Therefore the focus of innovation has not been to increase the durability of goods, but to focus on adding features which, in terms of cost vs. benefit, were significantly higher in cost than realized benefit. And so marketing so heavily focused on the conspicuous consumption aspect of commodity ownership, for its conspiculous aspects, as explained by Thorstein Veblen in his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and operationalized in the revolution in advertising which is generally attributed to Edward Bernays’ 1923 classic Crystallizing Public Opinion. Moreover, the entire ‘philanthropic’ parade from Rockefeller down to Gates can only be fully understood through the lens of Bernays.

Origins of the 4^th Industrial Revolution

The phrase ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ we are erroneously informed by Wikipedia, is said to have been introduced by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Yet this is credited based on a 2015 article published in the Atlanticist magazine, Foreign Affairs “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution“ . This would go on to become theme of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

So what exactly is the 4th Industrial Revolution if not yet another ploy by the elites to use new technologies to further enslave humanity?

Wikipedia’s revisionism entirely ignores its use in futurist circles among thinkers, techies, and independent investors going back nearly two decades. These were in turn inspired by the New Wave Science Fiction movement of thee 60’s and 70’s, and a related genre, Cyberpunk. Even in the Wiki article which begins by falsely attributing 4IR to Klaus Schwab, they later admit that the term dates back to at least the Hannover Faire in Germany in 2011. But the term (or similar) dates back another decade before it. The concept itself dates back to the 19th century, seeing what increased automation would mean. This is a function of the organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant to variable capital.

Dragon investor knows that investing in a new product which lasts forever is a non-starter. And yet technology has long existed which could tremendously extend the lifespan of any given product. The replacement of plastic parts with the actually cheaper to produce tin, for example, has been documented for nearly 70 years as a product-life extending material.

This would have eradicated global poverty within a generation. But instead the control-paradigm which required the constant upwards redistribution of wealth towards the aim of control, and the requirement that people keep themselves busy with work (idle hands do the devil’s work), was the more ‘logical’ model, provided that the aim is conserving power and not liberalizing human freedom and dignity.

And so why we are seeing this great coup against republican democracies right now, the Covid-19 ‘Great Reset’, is not because the time is opportune nor because the financial elites are in a position of strength. It is not because they have done the sufficient ground work to smoothly transition into a post financial control matrix. But rather because time is running out and their position of strength is weakening by the day.

This is all because of the declining rate of profit which the 4th Industrial Revolution is the solution for. Those technologies have been developing swiftly since the 1950’s. Now to repeat, there are various possible iterations of ‘a’ 4th Industrial Revolution – some are emancipatory and liberatory in nature. And yet others (the one being pursued by the financial elites and as spelled out by the World Economic Forum) are based in misanthropy, population reduction, thought-control and policing, and the ‘long dark winter’.

Why would we want those who so disastrously brought about the ‘Great Reset’ to then go on to manage for us the ‘4^th Industrial Revolution’?

The roots of forecasting the 4^th Industrial revolution were based in post-capitalist economic theory, and looked at sub-dividing capitalism into further historical mini-stages. This was so that the development of capitalism away from variable capital (human labor) and towards constant capital (machines) could be more accurately described and projected. It was a descriptive and predictive model. Secondarily, it has always been a fact of life that many of the same technologies that can liberate humanity can also enslave them.

A better 4^th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in a personal garage, having their own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm.

With that comes ‘self-employment’, and a tremendously reduced (and self-created) work schedule of working in one’s own garage. Now, there are various transitional models which involve more local community efforts, and the requisite specializations and down-stream repair micro-economies at the local level that would flow from this.

AI and ‘cybernetics’ are also fields that are developing, but strictly speaking are irrelevant to the 4IR if the liberatory potential of post-scarcity economics is understood.

Cybernetics isn’t necessarily involved in the decentralized and localized outcomes of the IoT.

Applied cybernetics (as envisioned by the World Economic Form) and, with it, ID2020 and beyond, are the opposite of any 4^th Industrial Revolution if we understand the liberatory potential of 4IR.

Their vision attempts to ‘Uberize’ the entire economy. The idea here is to eliminate all permanent work, but in its place have non-contracted temporary work, which changes on a nearly daily basis. This is similar to the disastrous ‘Labor Ready’ model already seen in the U.S.

The dystopic idea here is that everyone has a ‘chip’ implanted in them, and this has all their biometric data as well as serving as their bank card. People will earn credits when they receive work assignments at a random new location on a given day, and successfully complete that work.

Unfortunately, the liberatory potential of the 4IR is not understood by those who quite rightly reject the financialist institutional version of it. How these work towards a liberatory agenda of personal freedom, localism, and the foundation for intentional communities based on shared values, is being obscured by the official proponents of the false 4th Industrial Revolution from the World Economic Forum.

In the same way that the financial elites have somewhat erroneously called their corporate-statist monopoly system ‘capitalism’ (if capitalism is understood as competition between players with equal legal rights), they are calling the next system they have in mind the ‘4^th industrial revolution’, when in fact it works against the actual 4IR that can be.

And while the phrases and incessant quacking about ‘decentralization’ and ‘internet of things’, along with ‘3D printing’ are also used in the false version of 4IR, likewise we have seen for the past hundred years the corporate monopoly system nevertheless use the language of ‘markets’, ‘private property’ and ‘freedom’ when in fact those components of the corporate system have not really been its most prominent features.

This, practically alone, informs us on the fraudulence which is the World Economic Forum’s 4IR. Just as ‘capitalism’ has not truly relied on free competition, the 4IR being proposed will not truly be based on a decentralized model of 3D printing.

Rather, they will sit on 3D printing and the internet of things until other, really unrelated technologies like pre-crime detectors and other surveillance state techniques, can be implemented. Then they will try to centralize 3D printing when by its very nature, it is best suited to decentralization – thus eliminating various downstream and distribution middle-men. Bear in mind, that the coercive techniques implemented first will be part of a global population reduction scheme with the aim of reducing the population by as much as 90% its present number.

But the aim for the plutocrats in transition to a new kind of oligarchy, they are trying to maintain what Karl Wittfogel described as a ‘Hydraulic Civilization’ in his seminal book Oriental Despotism (1957). Here we understand that the difference with the free-farmers and peasants typical of Northern Europe were made possible because of the relatively high level of annual rain-fail. In many ways, liberal ideas of personal freedom that developed out of the middle-ages and into modernity in Northern Europe are a vestige of this economic, agricultural, reality.

In contrast, the Chaldean and Egyptian hydraulic civilizations of which Rome took its model, were based upon a militarized control over relatively centralized waterways (the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile). Access required paying of taxes, fines, fees, military service, and a whole array of other control mechanisms. In a post-economic order that we see on the horizon, one component of this is the transformation of a whole and larger section of society into ‘contact tracers’, a new security apparatus of ‘block captains’, of snitches, of informants against the rest of society. A reference here is the 1977 science fiction work ‘A Scanner Darkly’, by Philip K. Dick

Today the oligarchs are trying to make a Hydraulic Society out of 3D printing, but first need to establish a new coercive model of control over these new productive modes. Even to the extent of manufacturing pandemics, forced lockdowns, and a ‘cyber-pandemic’ of intentional, rolling black-outs.

But the more obvious implementation of 3D printing is more akin to rainfall. That is the primary contradiction at present.

The cornerstone of any 4IR that is workable for humanity, in line with the rights of man and based upon the dignity of the human spirit, is by definition based on a new form of cottage industry which the internet of things and 3D printing make possible.

Humanity was made in the image of its creator, and is worthy of a society reflective of his magnificence. It’s time to blow up the dam and stand under the rain-fall.

THE RISE OF THE CYBORGIAN CONSUMER

Posted on November 8, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Elva Thompson

Source: Waking Times

“You don’t take over the world with gaudy displays of violence. Real control is surgical, and invisible.” ~ John Greer – Person of Interest, Season 4, Episode: YHVH

The Posthuman (or Transhuman) Movement was formally established in California in the early 1980s. A central figure within the movement, Nick Bostrom, declared that Posthumanism holds to the belief that human nature is an improvable structure, and all its capacities can be enhanced through the use of ‘applied science’. The proposition is that human beings should use technology to transcend the limits of body and mind. Posthumanists do not see humanity as isolated physical entities but as distributed processes within a system. ‘THE BODY IS OBSOLETE’ is their battle cry, but the Posthuman seems to be defined by a lack of definition.

Stephen Brown, the doyen of marketing and interpretive consumer research, introduced the term apophasis. This is a curious choice of word, as it is a theological term which refers to knowing God through negation, or what God is not. Apophasis is from the ancient Greek, meaning to deny or negate. The problem seems to be that we can happily describe what a human being does or performs, but there is a difficulty when it comes to describing what a human being is. This lays bare the profound incapacity of language to penetrate into the very essence of things. In other words, to fully express Being, (I bet humpback whales don’t have this problem).

I Consume, Therefore I Am

To the Posthumanist technocrats, ‘natural man’ is a failed project that desperately needs to be improved upon. But before this can happen radical changes need to be made to our current conceptions of what it means to be human. Traditional accounts of the state of being human are based upon Cartesian worldviews, which regard external reality as objectively recordable and expressed primarily through mathematical laws.

People, as physically isolated thinking mammals, are viewed as necessary consumers within a society that is imagined to be ever abundant and fruitful. This is the Gaia of Classical thought, an ever-producing cornucopia of unquenchable life. Consuming this bounty is our essential function, and God-given right. Not only that, but the mind, or disembodied consciousness, is now theorized to be nothing more than an information processor. This data collecting ‘machine’, being rational and scientific, is external to the fixed social reality which it continually observes and records.

Posthumanism, conversely, puts the emphasis on socio-cultural and technological contexts, and the individual consciousnesses are but processes within this contextual framework. These are socially constructed “hybrid marketplace matrices” using a variety of social, economic and technological systems to control and manoeuvre the population through their insatiable desire to consume. The boundary between the individual and society is seen as being porous and amorphous. Reality becomes protean, as nothing is stable, and it becomes difficult to draw a clear line between the human, the animal and the machine. This is viewed as a natural societal progression, the next phase of an ever-evolving humanity.

“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” ~ Donna J. Haraway

The rational consumer is now replaced by a bio-technological symbiont, or cyborg. As the “proto-typical posthumanist consumer”, the cyborg is seen as the most popular manifestation of the posthuman. This image contains a dichotomy, though, as it is both liberatory and oppressive. The hope is that it can liberate mankind from organic failures, such as ageing and disease, yet contains the fear of a powerful hierarchical elite of technologized bio-machines lording it over the general unmodified masses.

Yet, the cyborg is a hybrid, a bio-technological chimera, and cannot exist without social, economic and technological systems. It is fundamentally a process (or even a product) rather than a Being, a verb rather than a noun. It has lost its essential individuality and become subsumed in the process itself. A cyborg is a Golem by any other name. The Golem is one of the oldest legends of artificial creation, barring Hermetic tales of Egyptian magic instilling stone statues with the consciousness of their gods or neters.

Similarly, through the power of Jewish cabbalism, a model of stone or metal could be infused with life (the root of the word golem is golmi, meaning ‘unformed limbs’). The modern attempt to create consciousness within digital constructs is no different.

Ironically, Descartes himself was fascinated by the automaton, comparing it favourably with the human body. In the late 1980s Hans Moravec, a faculty member of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern. He suggested that this proposition can be demonstrated by downloading human consciousness into a computer, thus proving that machines can become human. He believed that robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030 – 2040.

Almost 30 years later, a large percent of human communication is mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the creation of identity that it can no longer be meaningfully separated from the human subject. In other words, we are in the initial stages of becoming cyborgs. We may not be physically augmented by technology, but we are beginning to think in the same manner as machines, or the algorithms that run them. The more we use computers, and spend our valuable time prowling around the internet, the more we embody becoming Posthuman. We are already well on the way to becoming cyborg.

“Beam me up, Scotty.” Captain James T. Kirk, any original Star Trek episode.

In 1948, the mathematician Norbert Weiner published a book entitled ‘Cybernetics: control and communication in the animal and machine’. Here he proposed it was possible to telegraph a human being, imagining that the body can be dematerialised into an informational pattern and rematerialised at a different location. More recently, molecular biology treats information as the essential code the body expresses, what we know as DNA. This is termed the ‘impossible inversion’, where information becomes primary and materiality secondary.

During our present cultural moment the belief is that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates. “Beam me up, Scotty” has become a cultural icon for the global information age. Information has now come to be conceptualised as an entity in itself, existing separately from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded.

As such, information can be considered the thoughts of the machine and a biological body is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitable consequence of material life. In his book ‘The Order of Things’ (1973), the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested that “man” is no more than a historical construct whose era is about to end. The Posthuman view considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon, an evolutionary by-product or secondary effect. The physical body is considered as the original prosthesis we, as a species, learned to manipulate.

Extending or replacing the biological body with artificial prostheses is therefore a continuation of an evolutionary process. This view, in turn, configures the human being to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the Posthuman world there is no essential demarcation between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism.

Posthumanism does away with the ‘natural self’, rejecting the arguments that the social philosophers Hobbes and Locke constructed about humans being originally in a ‘state of nature’, and therefore owing nothing to society, as that was an after-effect. Instead, the Posthuman is an amalgamation of diverse components, a material-information entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.

Chaos out of Order?

Indeed, the situation just described seems to contradict the oft touted phrase of the elite: Ordo Ab Chao, or order out of chaos. The beliefs of the Posthumanists appear to reverse the above declaration. Instead of an ordered reality complete with clearly defined boundaries and roles for the inhabitants of society, they appear to offer an amalgamated mass of ever-changing variables that resemble the protean, but infinitely fecund, primal Chaos that preceded the manifestation of this physical universe. Is it the intentional creation of a universal Chaos (alchemically merging mineral with vegetable, namely silicon with carbon) from which a new level of Order can be produced?

Addendum: it struck me that posthuman is nearly posthumous, and thus denoting the death-knell of the natural human being.

The Varieties of Psychonautic Experience: Erik Davis’s ‘High Weirdness’

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Art by Arik Roper

By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
By Erik Davis
Strange Attractor Press/MIT Press, 2019

Two months ago, I devoured Erik Davis’s magisterial 2019 book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies the same weekend I got it, despite its 400-plus pages of sometimes dense, specialist prose. And for the past two months I have tried, in fits and starts, to gather together my thoughts on it—failing every single time. Sometimes it’s been for having far too much to say about the astonishing level of detail and philosophical depth contained within. Sometimes it’s been because the book’s presentation of the visionary mysticism of three Americans in the 1970s—ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna, parapolitical trickster Robert Anton Wilson, and paranoid storyteller-mystic Philip K. Dick—has hit far too close to home for me personally, living in the late 2010s in a similarly agitated political (and mystical) state. In short, High Weirdness has seemed to me, sitting on my bookshelf, desk, or in my backpack, like some cursed magical grimoire out of Weird fiction—a Necronomicon or The King in Yellow, perhaps—and I became obsessed with its spiraling exploration of the unfathomable universe above and the depthless soul below. It has proven itself incapable of summary in any linear, rationalist way.

So let’s dispense with rationalism for the time being. In the spirit of High Weirdness, this review will try to weave an impressionistic, magical spell exploring the commonalities Davis unveils between the respective life’s work and esoteric, drug-aided explorations of McKenna, Wilson, and Dick: explorations that were an attempt to construct meaning out of a world that to these three men, in the aftermath of the cultural revelations and revolutions of the 1960s that challenged the supposed wisdom and goodness of American hegemony, suddenly offered nothing but nihilism, paranoia, and despair. These three men were all, in their own unique ways, magicians, shamans, and spiritualists who used the tools at their disposal—esoteric traditions from both East and West; the common detritus of 20th century Weird pop culture; technocratic research into the human mind, body, and soul; and, of course, psychedelic drugs—to forge some kind of new and desperately-needed mystical tradition in the midst of the dark triumph of the Western world’s rationalism.

A longtime aficionado of Weird America, Davis writes in the introduction to High Weirdness about his own early encounters with Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, the Church of the SubGenius, and other underground strains of the American esoteric in the aftermath of the ’60s and ’70s. As someone who came late in life to a postgraduate degree program (High Weirdness was Davis’s doctoral dissertation for Rice University’s Religion program, as part of a curriculum focus on Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism), I find it incredibly easy to identify with Davis’s desire to tug at the edges of his longtime association with and love for the Weird in a scholarly context. This book’s scholarly origins do not make High Weirdness unapproachable to the layperson, however. While Davis does delve deeply into philosophical and spiritual theorists and the context of American mysticism throughout the book, he provides succinct and germane summaries of this long history, translating the work of thinkers as diverse as early 20th century psychologist and student of religious and mystical experience William James to contemporary theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk and Mark Fisher. Davis’s introduction draws forth in great detail the long tradition of admitting the ineffable, the scientifically-inexplicable, into the creation of subjective, individual mystical experiences.

Primary among Davis’s foundational investigations, binding together all three men profiled in the book, is a full and thorough accounting of the question, “Why did these myriad mystical experiences all occur in the first half of the 1970s?” It’s a fairly common historical interpretation to look at the Nixon years in America as a hangover from the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, a retrenchment of Nixon’s “silent majority” of middle- and working-class whites vs. the perceived chaos of a militant student movement and identity-based politics among racial and sexual minorities. Davis admits that the general mystical seeking that went on in the early ’70s is a reaction to this revanchism. And while he quotes Robert Anton Wilson’s seeming affirmation of this idea—“The early 70s were the days when the survivors of the Sixties went a bit nuts”—his interest in the three individuals at the center of his study allows him to delve deeper, offering a more profound explanation of the politics and metaphysics of the era. In the immediate aftermath of the assassinations, the political and social chaos, and the election of Nixon in 1968, there was an increased tendency among the younger generation to seek alternatives to mass consumption culture, to engage in what leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse would term “the Great Refusal.” All three of the figures Davis focuses on in this book, at some level or another, decided to opt out of what their upbringings and conformist America had planned for them, to various levels of harm to their livelihoods and physical and mental health. This refusal was part of an awareness of what a suburban middle-class life had excised from human experience: a sense of meaning-making, of a more profound spirituality detached from the streams of traditional mainline American religious life.

To find something new, the three men at the center of High Weirdness were forced to become bricoleurs—cobbling together a “bootstrap witchery,” in Davis’s words—from real-world occult traditions (both Eastern and Western); from the world of Cold War technocratic experimentation with cybernetics, neuroscience, psychedelics, and out-and-out parapsychology; and from midcentury American pop culture, including science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and pulp fiction. Davis intriguingly cites Dick’s invention of the term “kipple” in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a key concept in understanding how this detritus can be patched together and brought new life. Given Dick’s overall prescience in predicting our 21st century world of social atomization and disrepair, this seems a conceptual echo worth internalizing a half-century later. If the late 1960s represented a mini-cataclysm that showed a glimpse of what a world without the “Black Iron Prison” might look like, those who graduated to the 1970s—the ones who “went a bit nuts”—needed to figure out how to survive by utilizing the bits and scraps left behind after the sweeping turbulence blew through. In many ways, McKenna, Wilson, and Dick are all post-apocalyptic scavengers.

All three men used drugs extensively, although not necessarily as anthropotechnics specifically designed to achieve enlightenment (Davis notes that Dick in particular had preexisting psychological conditions that, in conjunction with his prodigious use of amphetamines in the 1960s, were likely one explanation for his profound and sudden breaks with consensus reality in the ’70s). But we should also recognize (as Davis does) that McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were also, in many ways, enormously privileged. As well-educated scions of white America, born between the Great Depression and the immediate aftermath of World War II, they had the luxury to experiment with spirituality, psychedelic drugs, and technology to various degrees while holding themselves consciously separate from the mainstream institutions that would eventually co-opt and recuperate many of these strains of spirituality and individual seeking into the larger Spectacle. As Davis cannily notes, “Perhaps no one can let themselves unravel into temporary madness like straight white men.” But these origins also help explain the expressly technocratic bent of many of their hopes (McKenna) and fears (Wilson and Dick). Like their close confederate in Weirdness, Thomas Pynchon (who spent his early adulthood working for defense contractor Boeing, an experience which allowed him a keener avenue to his literary critiques of 20th century America), all three men were adjacent to larger power structures that alternately thrilled and repelled them, and which also helped form their specific esoteric worldviews.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to summarize the seven central chapters of the book, which present in great detail Terence (and brother Dennis) McKenna’s mushroom-fueled experiences contacting a higher intelligence in La Chorrera, Colombia in 1971, Robert Anton Wilson’s LSD-and-sex-magick-induced contact with aliens from the star Sirius in 1973 and ’74 as detailed in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, and Philip K. Dick’s famous series of mystical transmissions and revelations in February and March of 1974, which influenced not only his fiction output for the final eight years of his life but also his colossal “Exegesis,” which sought to interpret these mystical revelations in a Christian and Gnostic context. Davis’s book is out there and I can only encourage you to buy a copy, read these chapters, and revel in their thrilling detail, exhilarating madness, and occasional absurdity. Time and time again, Davis, like a great composer of music, returns to his greater themes: the environment that created these men gave them the tools and technics to blaze a new trail out of the psychological morass of Cold War American culture. At the very least, I can present some individual anecdotes from each of the three men’s mystical experiences, as described by Davis, that should throw some illumination on how they explored their own psyches and the universe using drugs, preexisting religious/esoteric ritual, and the pop cultural clutter that had helped shape them.

Davis presents a chapter focusing on each man’s life leading up to his respective spiritual experiences, followed by a chapter (in the case of Philip K. Dick, two) on his mystical experience and his reactions to it. For Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis, their research into organic psychedelics such as the DMT-containing yagé (first popularized in the West in the Cold War period by William S. Burroughs), alternately known as oo-koo-hé or ayahuasca, led them to South America to find the source of these natural, indigenous entheogens. But at La Chorrera in Colombia they instead met the plentiful and formidable fungus Psilocybe cubensis. In their experiments with the mushroom, Terence and Dennis tuned into perceived resonances with long-dormant synchronicities within their family histories, their childhood love of science fiction, and with the larger universe. Eventually, Dennis, on a more than week-long trip on both mushrooms and ayahuasca, needed to be evacuated from the jungle, but not before he had acted as a “receiver” for cryptic hyper-verbal transmissions, the hallucinogens inside him a “vegetable television” tuned into an unseen frequency—a profound shamanic state that Terence encouraged. The language of technology, of cybernetics, of science is never far from the McKenna brothers’ paradigm of spirituality; the two boys who had spent their childhoods reading publications like Analog and Fate, who had spent their young adulthoods studying botany and science while deep in the works of Marshall McLuhan (arguably a fellow psychedelic mystic who, like the McKennas and Wilson, was steeped in a Catholic cultural tradition), used the language they knew to explain their outré experiences.

Wilson spent his 20s as an editor for Playboy magazine’s letters page and had thus been exposed to the screaming gamut of American political paranoia (while contributing to it in his own inimitable prankster style). He had used this parapolitical wilderness of mirrors, along with his interest in philosophical and magickal orientations such as libertarianism, Discordianism, and Crowleyian Thelema as fuel for both the Illuminatus! trilogy of books written with Robert Shea (published in 1975), and his more than year-long psychedelic-mystical experience in 1973 and 1974, during which he claimed to act as a receiver on an “interstellar ESP channel,” obtaining transmissions from the star Sirius. His experiences as detailed in Cosmic Trigger involve remaining in a prolonged shamanic state (what Wilson called the “Chapel Perilous,” a term redolent with the same sort of medievalism as the McKenna brothers’ belief that they would manifest the Philosopher’s Stone at La Chorrera), providing Wilson with a constant understanding of the universe’s playfully unnerving tendency towards coincidence and synchronicity. Needless to say, the experiences of one Dr. John C. Lilly, who was also around this precise time tuned into ostensible gnostic communications from a spiritual supercomputer, mesh effortlessly with Wilson’s (and Dick’s) experiences thematically; Wilson even used audiotapes of Lilly’s lectures on cognitive meta-programming to kick off his mystical trances. Ironically, it was UFO researcher and keen observer of California’s 1970s paranormal scene Jacques Vallée who helped to extract Wilson out of the Chapel Perilous—by retriggering his more mundane political paranoia, saying that UFOs and other similar phenomena were instruments of global control. In Davis’s memorable words, “Wilson did not escape the Chapel through psychiatric disenchantment but through an even weirder possibility.”

Philip K. Dick, who was a famous science fiction author at the dawn of the ’70s, had already been through his own drug-induced paranoias, political scrapes, and active Christian mystical seeking. Unlike McKenna and Wilson, Dick was a Protestant who had stayed in close contact with his spiritual side throughout adulthood. In his interpretation of his mystical 2-3-74 experience, Dick uses the language and epistemology of Gnostic mystical traditions two millennia old. Davis also notes that Dick used the plots of his own most overtly political and spiritual ’60s output to help him understand and interpret his transcendent experiences. Before he ever heard voices or received flashes of information from a pink laser beam or envisioned flashes of the Roman Empire overlapping with 1970s Orange County California, Dick’s 1960s novels, specifically The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and Ubik (1969), had explored the very nature of reality and admitted the possibility of a Gnostic universe run by unknowable, cruel demiurges. Even in these hostile universes, however, there exists a messenger of hope and mercy who seeks to destroy the illusion of existence and bring relief. These existing pieces of cultural and religious “kipple,” along with the parasocial aspects of Christian belief that were abroad in California at the time, such as the Jesus People movement (the source of the Ichthys fish sign that triggered the 2-3-74 experience), gave Dick the equipment he needed to make sense of the communications he received and the consoling realization that he was not alone, that he was instead part of an underground spiritual movement that acted as a modern-day emanation of the early Christian church.

After learning about these three figures’ shockingly similar experiences with drug-induced contact with beyond, the inevitable question emerges: what were all these messages, these transmissions from beyond, trying to convey? One common aspect of all three experiences is how cryptic they are (and how difficult and time-consuming it was for each of these men to interpret just what the messages were saying). It’s also a little sobering to discover through Davis’s accounts how personal all three experiences were, whether it’s Terence and Dennis’s private fraternal language during the La Chorrera experiment, or mysterious phone calls placed back in time to their mother in childhood, or a lost silver key that Dennis was able to, stage-magician-like, conjure just as they were discussing it, or the message Philip K. Dick received to take his son Christopher to the doctor for an inguinal hernia that could have proven fatal. But alongside these personal epiphanies, there is also always an undeniable larger social and political context, especially as both Wilson and Dick saw their journeys in 1973 and 1974 as a way to confront and deal with the intense paranoia around Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon (in his chapter setting the scene of the ’70s, Davis calls Watergate “a mytho-poetic perversion of governance”). In every case, the message from beyond requires interpretation, meaning-making, and, in Davis’s terminology, “constructivism.” The reams of words spoken and written by all three men analyzing their respective mystical experiences are an essential part of the experience. And these personal revelations all are attempts by the three men to make sense of the chaos of both their personal lives and their existence in an oppressive 20th century technocratic society: to inject some sense of mystery into daily existence, even if it took the quasi-familiar and, yes, somewhat comforting form of transmissions from a mushroom television network or interstellar artificial intelligence.

Over the past nine months I’ve spent much of my own life completing (and recovering from the process of completing) a Master’s degree. My own academic work, focusing on nostalgia’s uses in binding together individuals and communities with their museums, tapped into my earliest memories of museum visits in the late 1970s, when free education was seemingly everywhere (and actually free), when it was democratic and diverse, when it was an essential component of a rapidly-disappearing belief in social cohesion. In a lot of ways, my work at We Are the Mutants over the past three years is the incantation of a spell meant to conjure something new and hopeful from the “kipple” of a childhood suffused in disposable pop culture, the paranormal and “bootstrap witchery,” and science-as-progress propaganda. At the same time, over the past three years the world has been at the constant, media-enabled beck and call of a figure ten times more Weird and apocalyptic and socially malignant than any of Philip K. Dick’s various Gnostic emanations of Richard Nixon.

Philip K. Dick believed he was living through a recapitulation of the Roman Empire, that time was meaningless when viewed from the perspective of an omniscient entity like VALIS. In the correspondences and synchronicities I have witnessed over the past few months—in the collapse of political order and the revelation of profound, endemic corruption behind the scenes of the ruling class—this sense of recurring history has sent me down a similar set of ecstatic and paranoid corridors as McKenna, Wilson, and Dick. The effort to find meaning in a world that once held some inherent structure in childhood but has become, in adulthood, a hollow facade—a metaphysical Potemkin village—is profoundly unmooring. But meaning is there, even if we need technics such as psychedelic drugs, cybernetics (Davis’s final chapter summarizing how the three men’s mystical explorations fed into the internet as we know it today is absolutely fascinating), and parapolitical activity to interpret it. On this, the 50th anniversary of the summer of 1969, commonly accepted as the moment the Sixties ended, with echoes of moon landings and Manson killings reverberating throughout the cultural theater, is it any wonder that the appeal of broken psychonauts trying to pick up the pieces of a shattered world would appeal to lost souls in 2019? High Weirdness as a mystical tome remains physically and psychically close to me now, and probably will for the remainder of my life; and if the topics detailed in this review intrigue you the way they do me, it will remain close to you as well.

Stick to the Plan

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Illustration by Mike Faille

Reclaiming central planning from the clutches of corporations

By Brendan James

Source: The Baffler

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

–CCA Chairman Arthur Jensen, Network

WHAT DO JEFF BEZOS AND JOSEPH STALIN have in common? A certain supervillain chic. Cold-blooded austerity. Iron discipline. A penchant for back-breaking output targets. A healthy appetite for terror.

Yet perhaps their most surprising overlap is that the General Secretary and the chairman of Amazon, Inc. built two of history’s largest centrally planned economies. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising: What embodies the trademark Bezos-ethos of “Get Big Fast” better than the Five-Year Plan? Thanks to its cutting-edge logistics and coordinated supply chains, Amazon last year clocked a GDP of $230 billion[*]. To Jared Kushner’s recent demand that “the government should be run like a great American company,” let all communists raise a fist of solidarity!

In fact, write Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart, Amazon is just one of thousands of firms, big and small, that centrally plan their inputs and outputs. Of the top hundred global economies, around sixty-nine of them are businesses, not countries; most, if not all, are internally planned. (Sears, which over the last decade broke its firm into an “internal market” of competing units thanks to CEO and Ayn Rand-devotee Eddie Lampert, is conspicuously absent from this list.) Despite the collapse of the USSR and the global gospel of markets that spread in its wake, it seems planning is still working all around us.

The problem is that planning is not working for most of us. Yes, automation and “Big Data” have conjured cheaper goods for consumers—unfortunately, most consumers are also laborers who remain ruthlessly exploited. As the promise of new technology expands each day, workers sleep while standing or collapse from heat exhaustion. Planning, once a revolutionary tool meant to reduce labor time and eliminate exploitation, has become just another vulgar mechanism for maximizing the profits of unelected, authoritarian, union-busting, planet-cooking, superrich vampires. The People’s Republic of Walmart makes the case that the left should reclaim the radical demand for a democratically planned economy and repurpose this corporate apparatus for the flourishing of all. Far from a dry pamphlet on logistics theory, the book raises crucial questions about justice, technology, and our capacity to build a new world in the face of economic and climate catastrophe.

The planned economy was supposed to have gone extinct three decades ago. The Soviet Union gasped its last breath, American capitalism sprayed a bottle of Cristal, European social democracy ordered another latte, and China pressed a big button labeled “Market Socialism.” But if you really put the time in, you could probably get a wonk from the Hoover Institution to grudgingly accept that government planning still beats the market in the realm of certain public services, such as health care or fire departments. The knives come out, though, when this approach is proposed for things like housing, pharmaceuticals, energy, or, heaven forbid, consumer goods in general.

What may surprise newcomers, however, is that many self-described Marxists are wary of planning, too. Despite being thanked in Phillips and Rozworski’s acknowledgements, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing magazine Jacobin, identifies as a market socialist. In a 2013 essay sketching an agenda for the left, Jacobin’s executive editor Seth Ackerman conceded that markets are necessary, so perhaps we’d best just find a way to socialize them. Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology and, along with Sunkara, one of several co-authors of The ABCs of Socialism, dismisses planning as a dead-end: “We can want planning to work, but we have no evidence that it can.” One of the left’s “worst legacies” has been to “identify socialism with central planning.” Market socialism, we’re told, is communism for grown-ups.

Everyone from the market socialist to the Austrian economist has taken one side of an incredibly sexy academic exchange known as the “socialist calculation debate.” The argument should be familiar: market transactions provide producers with essential information about what consumers and other producers need, and therefore how much to make. To try and calculate (that is, plan) this galaxy of interdependent inputs and outputs is impossible in a fluid economy. It’s a matter of information, you fool. And like it or not, market prices are the best way to collect the information we need to map out supply and demand.

A rich tradition of heterodox economics, mathematics, and computer science has materialized to answer this problem of calculation. But it is modern processing power, dwarfing the bandwidth available in the twentieth century, that truly rebukes the argument above. Consider computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott who, in about two minutes, using only university equipment, claims to have run models that were able to optimize an economy “roughly the size of Sweden.” You get the feeling that the mammoth data centers at Amazon, Ford, or Foxconn might be capable of even more impressive calculations. And besides, to insist communist theory prove some perfect equation is either disingenuous or missing the point. The question is not whether planning is mathematically pristine, but whether it can allocate better than the market.

The answer, to return to the material world, is yes it can. It’s true that under capitalism firms plan internally but compete with each other, a dance that keeps companies innovating new ways to capture surplus and, sometimes, inadvertently benefit regular people. This dynamic would not occur naturally in a planned economy; one cannot just seize Amazon or Walmart, socialize it, and call it a day. Phillips and Rozworski apparently recognize this (there is an entire chapter in The People’s Republic of Walmart titled “Nationalization Is Not Enough”) and point to an interesting line of thought from economist J. W. Mason: Banks tend to operate as a privatized Gosplan, where the slush fund of finance capital flows to whichever firm a group of Brooks Brothers-clad planners decide deserves investment, regardless of profitability. Market competition, in other words, is hardly the divine engine of innovation if so many firms are, as Mason writes, “born new each day by the grace of those financing it.”

Even so, could planning replicate the market’s capacity to innovate? Ford’s former CEO Mark Fields certainly seemed to think so, declaring in 2016 that his company would soon “be able to use analytics to anticipate people’s needs, as opposed to people trying to tell us what they want.” And to the perennial taunt of the lizard-brained conservative—“I love seeing idiot millennials protest capitalism on their Apple-made IPHONES”—one may point out it was largely the market-immune Pentagon and Department of Energy, not Apple, that developed the batteries, algorithms, touch screens, and microprocessors our right-wing friend uses to tweet about the Muslim Caravan. Once again, none of this is to celebrate the actual decisions or practitioners of planning as it exists under capitalism, but to recognize its power and how else it might be put to use.

So much for feasibility. Still, the left has good reason to harbor deeper techno-skepticism. When most of us hear the phrase “data collection,” we think not so much of social justice but of Facebook selling our personal information, NSA surveillance, and racist models of “predictive” policing. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks catalogs state policies that placed welfare applications, housing allocation, and child welfare investigations under algorithmic control. The results have been catastrophic for the poor and working class, of every race and gender. Algorithms, after all, are written by humans, and prejudices operate just as easily in digital form as they do in twentieth century analog—perhaps even more so. Phillips and Rozworski acknowledge this reality and rightfully urge vigilance. If planning is to make use of such technology, we must make sure not to bake this poison into the cake.

But hope lies in the very recognition that technology is a political construct, rather than some transcendental, neutral force. If we can program the reinforcement of hierarchies, we can certainly work to program their destruction. (There’s already encouraging research as to how to account for problems such as “disparate impact.”) As Eubanks writes, “if there is to be an alternative, we must build it on purpose, brick by brick and byte by byte.”

Beyond algorithmic justice, the real specter haunting socialism is, naturally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose record in planning was less than exemplary. While capital-C Communism brought about modern industry, literacy, and social security, Phillips and Rozworski don’t deny the ultimate failure of the Soviet experiment. The October Revolution was contorted and compromised by a world war, a civil war, imperialist invasion, economic backwardness, another world war, and a half-century of military competition with the United States. For the sake of the revolution, democracy was indefinitely postponed. Even if Soviet and East German firms were just as or more efficient than their Western counterparts, this arrangement still resulted in workers resisting work and managers lying about output, i.e., bad information. (In a particularly cruel irony, Gosplan bureaucrats even took to sabotaging new computerized approaches to planning, lest they personally lose their political clout. Their unlikely co-conspirators were “reform” minded crypto-capitalists who worried the algorithms would actually succeed, leaving planning in place forever!)

For Phillips and Rozworski, it wasn’t communist planning that led to authoritarianism and disaster, but authoritarianism and disaster that led to bad planning. “Democracy,” they write, “is not some abstract ideal tacked on to all this, but essential to the process.”

A few years ago. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty cast the very idea of Soviet planning as its hero, wherein it falls from grace, as all tragic heroes do. There’s no need to understate that tragedy, but it ispossible to overstate it. Let’s not forget what happened after the victorious arrival of the market in the former USSR: production of consumer goods, industrial output, and human life expectancy all cratered. A new class of homeless citizens emerged, frozen to death in streets, alleyways, and parks. We often discuss the millions of deaths in the Stalinist 1930s. We don’t discuss the millions of deaths in the post-Communist 1990s. Unsurprisingly, recent polling revealed that a majority of those surveyed in Russia still regret the collapse of the USSR and its planned economy. (In 1996 they nearly voted in Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov until—get this—right-wing hucksters colluded with a hostile foreign government to help install a widely unpopular and corrupt buffoon through a media campaign that peddled rank propaganda.) The Soviet experience was a lesson, all right, but not quite the one many smug market fetishists would have us believe.

And if all that can happen to a superpower, imagine what faced Chile, the would-be socialist alternative to Soviet technocracy: in 1970, buoyed by the support of the working class, Marxist president Salvador Allende was elected and set about building a nation-wide, participatory planning network. This novel approach was predictably stymied by a U.S. economic blockade and finally snuffed out by a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. Still, the pioneering spirit of this moment was poignantly captured by Eden Medina in her wonderful study Cybernetic Revolutionaries. What happened next is a depressing cliché: Chileans were placed under the rule of a distinctly not-left-wing dictatorship and enrolled as fresh test subjects in the mad laboratory of the market.

How will that same market treat the workers of tomorrow who fall victim to imminent waves of automation? Is the market really compatible long-term with progressive policy goals like universal basic income, or full employment? Will the market really permit the end of mass incarceration? Then there’s the C-word: last month we learned that potentially catastrophic climate change is now beyond prevention, and that even if we swore off carbon tomorrow, by 2099 the Arctic will still be 5°C hotter. The expression “glacial pace” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. In light of this, The Atlantic, official mouthpiece for the death god Nyarlathotep, predictably suggests that “any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times last month published an op-ed titled—no shit—“Can Exxon Mobil Protect Mozambique From Climate Change?”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Converting industries to renewable energy, Phillips and Rozworski argue, is wholly within the power of America, India, and China. But, wouldn’t you know it, the principles of commerce just aren’t incentivizing them fast enough! Carbon-free agriculture is a trickier feat, but certainly less tricky as a state-sponsored venture freed from market meddling, à la Sputnik or the Manhattan Project. Climate reporter Kate Aronoff suggests: “If you create a successful drive to nationalize [the fossil fuel industry] or rapidly scale back their power that will create a real precedent for other industries . . . then you can nationalize Monsanto. Have that be the crux of a populist demand of a climate movement.” There are different schools on the left when it comes to ecology (Phillips, science writer by day, has been criticized for consumerist, growth-happy “ecomodernism”), but one hopes we can all agree that smashing the existing energy market is a necessary step.

More than any other crisis of capitalism, ecological calamity is the most self-evident reason to abandon the dumb, short-sighted, animal logic of the market for a rational and humane plan. It has been, to quote the superior critique of capital, Gremlins 2, “a complete failure of management.” And if the history of capitalist crises is any guide, the odds are that climate change will produce a bigger, bulkier, more controlling state no matter what. Before things really start to crack up, we may want to pick whether that state runs on egalitarian principles or the fascist death drive. Does anyone who doesn’t own a yacht called Fountainhead truly want to cede that decision to the invisible hand of the market?

To their credit, Phillips and Rozworksi return throughout the book to the necessity of mass mobilization. Planning is not One Weird Trick to Achieve Socialism. Unless we simply want state-capitalist profit optimization, the real thing will require continuous and brutal class struggle. It will require experimentation, failure and, as Marv Alpert once said, tenacious defense. Any hope of success lies in a rejuvenated, robust and, yes, global people’s movement to shatter the political, legal and physical barricades put up by governments and capital. But planning must be part of the agenda.

Here the cybernetic concept of feedback is useful: the very idea of a plan, of giving everyone control of their own lives, is just the kind of revolutionary notion that can energize, inspire, and keep such a movement alive. The final line of Spufford’s Red Plenty need not be read as the end of a dream, but the real beginning of history: “Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?”

Hope for the best, of course. And plan for the worst.

Manufacturing Panic: Social Engineering, Domination and Control

Posted on October 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By S.C. Hickman

Source: Techno Occulture

In the 21st century, the social engineering of dread and longing have evolved into a bio-political arena of terror and a psycho-political culture of internalized domination. The globally deployed technology of the spectacle transforms to a creative panic industry, the pacification of the self and the silencing of multitudes. With no visible alternatives to universal pancapitalism there seems to be no need for payoffs for the disenchanted, no necessity to bribe the dissenting segments of the population and no incentive to grant extension of freedoms.1

Instead of peddling hope and visions of mutually shared commonwealth, authority is maintained by the production of synthetic fear and the need to secure property against some other. Deimos and Phobos, the gods of panic, angst and terror dominate the omni-directional realm of geo-psychological strategies in an asymmetric world war against invisible enemies without qualities. Market concentrations benefit neo-feudal power structures that know how to use access to media, private security and intelligence services to advance their interests. Austerity, power, and impersonal anonymity interface with a world replete with vast global migrations, desperation, and panic victims who willingly comply and give up liberties for shared security. An Orwellian world of competing agencies, wars, famines, and pestilence drive the panic cities of current criminal elements to traffic in sex, drugs, and war.

Private oligarchic networks of finance and business cartels cultivate relations to governmental entities controlling state agencies and military units. Media narratives and public relations strategies transform synthetic fear into advantages that produce windfalls of power and profit. This theater of fear is a skillful interplay of compartmentalized information units, privatized command centers, loyal officials and gatekeepers as well as professional Special Forces. Technocommercial Black-Ops programs that infiltrate both governmental and public spheres through experimental use of technics and pharmakon in collusion with DARPA and other shadow or Deep State agencies across the globe provide a base infrastructure for a 21st century society of control. Productions of artificial angst call for scenarios of counter-terrorist theater rehearsals and paramilitary actors as well as the professional staging of scapegoats and dupes. The dark networks draw on privatized intelligence units, so called “asteroids”, business entities which provide cover for compartmentalized operations.2

Space was formerly known as heaven and manned space flight from earth could be understood as mechanical equivalent to an ascent to divinity. Johannes Kepler suspected paradise to be located on the moon and Konstantin Tsiolkowsky, the Russian pioneer of modern rocket science, saw manned space flight as a freeway to the supernatural. In his novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” Thomas Pynchon contemplates the ambiguous interrelations between sex, rockets and magic.

Jack Parsons, a key figure in American rocketry, lost his reputation and security clearance in obsessive pursuit of occult rituals and sexual mumbo-jumbo before he diffused into space in a lab explosion in 1952. A crater on the dark side of the moon is named in memory of Parsons, a tribute to the shady cofounder of the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The 19th century spiritualist pseudoscience of a world of ghosts and occult belief in spirits, a complex adaptation to modernity, has morphed into 20th century sciences. From social theories and “optimization” of the workplace, from operations research to scientific communication and applied psychology, many genres of academic disciplines and the influence business are rooted in the twilight zone of the netherworlds.

When Norbert Wiener, who developed his work on cybernetics from ballistics research, writes that “Communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society” he evokes the ancient art of assessing the human personality and exploiting motivations. Developed out of clandestine mind control programs in the 1960’s, the methodical application of Personality Assessment Systems became standard operating procedure in business and intelligence. Systems of discipline and control which took shape in the 19th century on the basis of earlier procedures have mutated into new and aggressive forms, beyond simplistic theories of state and sovereignty. In the past, the science of power branched into the twin vectors of political control and control of the self.

In the 21st century the technologies of material control and subjective internalization are in a process of converging. The traditional twin operations, with which the authorities aim to win the hearts and minds, the binding maneuvers of law enforcement and the dazzling illusionist control of the imagination, are transforming into each other. Not unlike werewolves using the powers of the moon for a violent metamorphosis, contemporary agencies of power turn into shape shifters and fluctuating modes of dominance. Star Wars technology shape-shifts into applications of creative industries, into the domain of desire, imagination and mediated lunacy.

Technologies of individualization bound to controllable identities and the global machinery of homogenization are superimposing to a double-bind of contemporary power structures. The renaissance heretic Giordano Bruno anticipates these developments in his visionary treatise “De Vinculis in Genere” – a general account of bonding – on operational phantasms and the libidinal manipulation of the human spirit. The disputatious philosopher of an infinite universe, beyond his unique investigation into the imaginary and the persuasion of masses and the individual, also challenged the ontological separation between the spheres of the heavens and the sublunary world of his time.

Today, in a technological marriage of heaven and earth, there is a full spectrum military entertainment fusion of global conflict management. A strategic analysis of the enforced colonization of space and mind will certainly provide a more comprehensive understanding of the parameters of life and death on planet Earth. The extraterrestrial highway in the United States, is near the zone 51, a top secret area of the American army. In this zone “black projects” subjected to the secrecy defense are carried out. In 1994 a Congressional subcommittee revealed that up to 500,000 Americans were endangered by secret defense related tests between 1940 and 1974. They included covert experiments with radioactive materials, mustard gas, LSD, and biological agents.3

Disneyland and the global media sightings of men on the moon are exemplary for the universal power of imagination management and the spectacle. Receptiveness for the spectacle is deeply embedded in human desires for excitement, stimulation, knowledge acquisition and the construction of self esteem. Largely based on the biocybernetic exploitation of human response mechanisms that influence emotion, excitement and thrill, the technological spectacle in its play with danger and disorientation is rooted in the biology of ancient neural patterns. But its arena has been dramatically extended through technology. The machinery of the spectacle generates affect by triggering failures of orientation and control. This can be loss of physical balance, a rollercoaster ride or cognitive dissonance. The intensity of affect is directly correlated with the depth of disorientation and the more that vital human response structures are touched, the deeper the effect. Contextual parameters of relatively secure environments allow appreciating these disorientations as hedonistic experiences instead of discomfort and panic. These mechanisms trigger delight and numinous experiences, moving and enthusing audiences.

Aldous Huxley once remarked that there are two kinds of propaganda— rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody’s enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. 4

In the years and decades ahead both invasive and non-invasive technologies will enslave the uneducated masses, luring them with technologies of delight or fear to do the bidding of the Oligarchs without little or any resistance since for the most part people will willingly give up there freedoms for comfort, security, and happiness. Of course not all will give into such notions, nor condone the power of persuasion through both extrinsic propaganda and public relations, nor intrinsically through technological pharmakon or invasive forms of implants or nanobots. But these resistant anti-bodies will like any virus be hunted down and annihilated in a society that will have become a unified fascist enclave, a mindless world of automated machines both inorganic and organic. For in the end there will be no barriers between them, only the merger and enhancement of their twined potentials. This is the dark truth-condition of our future… can we stop it?

Konrad Becker, Hypno Politics, Hyper State Control, Law Entrainment and the Symbolic Order. Center for Cognitive Liberty (2015)
Lofgren, Mike. The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. Penguin Books (January 5, 2016); Englehardt, Tom. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Haymarket Books (September 15, 2014)
Valentine, Douglas. The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. Clarity Press (December 31, 2016)
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited. Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (July 1, 2014)

Snow, Death, and the Bewildered Herd

Posted on March 26, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Few people at this hour – and I refer to the time before the breaking out of this most grim war, which is coming to birth so strangely, as if it did not want to be born – few, I say, these days still enjoy that tranquility which permits one to choose the truth, to abstract one in reflection. Almost all the world is in tumult, is beside itself, and when man is beside himself he loses his most essential attribute: the possibility of meditating, or withdrawing into himself to come to terms with himself and define what it is he believes and what it is that he does not believe; what he truly esteems and what he truly detests. Being beside himself bemuses him, blinds him, forces him to act mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism.

-Ortega Y Gasset “The Self and the Other”

As I write these words, the house is being buried in a snowstorm. Heavy flakes fall slowly and silently as a contemplative peace muffles the frenetic agitation and speed of a world gone mad. A beautiful gift like this has no price, though there are those who would like to set one, as they do on everything. In my mind’s eye I see Boris Pasternak’s Yurii Zhivago, sitting in the penumbra of an oil lamp in the snowy night stillness of Varykino, scratching out his poems in a state of inspired possession. Outside the wolves howl. Inside the bedroom, his doomed lover, Lara, and her daughter sleep peacefully. The wolves are always howling.

Then my mind’s lamp flickers, and Ignacio Silone’s rebel character, Pietro Spina (from the novel Bread and Wine) appears. He is deep into heavy snow as he flees the Italian fascists by hiking into the mountains. There, too, howl the wolves, the omnipresent wolves, as the solitary rebel – the man who said “No” – slowly trudges in a meditative silence, disguised as a priest.

Images like these, apparitions of literary characters who never existed outside the imagination, might at first seem eccentric. But they appear to me because they are, like the silent snow that falls outside, evocative reminders of our need to stop the howling media streams long enough to set our minds on essential truths, to think and meditate on our fates – the fate of the earth and our individual fates. To resist the forces of death we need to concentrate, and that requires slow silence in solitude. That is why the world’s archetypal arch-enemy, Mr. Death himself, aka Satan, aka Screwtape, advises his disciple Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to befuddle people against the aberration of logic by keeping them distracted with contradictory, non-stop news reports. He tells him that “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real.’ “

It is a commonplace to say that we are being buried in continuous and never-ending information. Yet it is true. We are being snowed by this torrent of indigestible “news,” and it’s not new, just vastly increased in the last twenty-five years or so.

Writing fifty-eight years ago, C. Wright Mills argued:

It is not only information they need – in the Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it….What they need…is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.

Today, as we speed down the information superhighway, Mills’s words are truer than ever. But how to develop an imagination suffused with reason to arrive at lucid summations? Is it possible now that “the information bomb” (attributed to Einstein) has fallen?

Albert Camus once said that “at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” While that is still true today, I would add that the feeling of an agitated and distracted bewilderment is everywhere to be seen as multitudes scan their idiot boxes for the latest revelations. Beeping and peeping, they momentarily quell their nervous anxieties by being informed and simulating proximity through the ether. Permanently busy in their mediated “reality,” they watch as streaming data are instantly succeeded by streaming data in acts of digital dementia. For Camus the absurd was a starting point for a freer world of rebellion. For Walter Lippman, the influential journalist and adviser to presidents and potentates, “the bewildered herd” – his name for regular people, the 99 % – was a beginning and a wished for end. His elites, the 1 %, would bewilder the herd in order to control them. His wish has come true.

A surfeit of information, fundamental to modern propaganda, prevents people from forming considered judgments. It paralyzes them. Jacques Ellul writes in Propaganda:

Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual’s capacity for attention or adaptations. This trait of continuity explains why propaganda can indulge in sudden twists and turns. It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday.

Coherence and unity in claims aren’t necessary; contradictions work just as well. And the more the better: more contradictions, more consistency, more complementarity – just make it more. The system demands more. The informed citizen craves more; craves it faster and faster as the data become dada, an absurdist joke on logical thinking.

Wherever you go in the United States these days, you sense a generalized panic and an inability to slow down and focus. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness fill the air. Most people sense that something is seriously wrong, but don’t know exactly what. So they rage and rant and scurry along in a frenzy. It seems so huge, so everything, so indescribable. Minds like pointilliste canvases with thousands of data dots and no connections.

In the mid-1990s, when the electronic world of computers and the internet were being shoved down our throats by a consortium of national security state and computer company operatives (gladly swallowed then by many and now resulting in today’s total surveillance state), I became a member of The Lead Pencil Club foundered by Bill Henderson (The Pushcart Press) in honor of Thoreau’s father’s pencil factory and meant as a whimsical protest: “a pothole on the information superhighway.” There were perhaps 37 1/3 members worldwide, no membership roll, and no dues – just a commitment to use pencils to write and think slowly.

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” Thoreau asked. “We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”

So I am writing these words with a pencil, an object, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, which haunts our present electronic world by being a ruin of the past. It is not a question of nostalgia, for we are not returning to our lost homes, despite a repressed urge for simpler times. But the pencil is an object that stands as a warning of the technological hubris that has pushed our home on earth to the brink of nuclear extinction and made mush of people’s minds in grasping the reasons why.

I think of John Berger, the great writer on art and life, as I write, erase, cross out, rewrite – roll the words over and look at them, consider them. Berger who wrote: “Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper”; that “most mainstream political discourse today is composed of words that, separated from any creature of language, are inert….dead ‘word-mongering’ [that] wipes out memory and breeds a ruthless complacency.”

The pencil is not a fetish; it is a reminder to make haste slowly, to hear and feel my thinking on the paper, to honor the sacredness of what Berger calls the “confabulation” between words and their meaning. I smell the pencil’s wood, the tree of life, its slow ascent, rooted in the earth, the earth our home, our beginning and our end.

Imagining our ends, while always hard, has become much harder in modern times in western industrialized nations, especially the United States that reigns death down on the rest of the world while pretending it is immortal and immune from the nuclear weapons it brandishes. Yet the need to do so has become more important. When in 1939 Ortega y Gasset warned in the epigraph of a most grim war coming to birth so strangely, as people acted “mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism,” he was writing before nuclear weapons, the ultimate technology. If today we cannot imagine our individual deaths, how can we imagine the death of the earth? In a 1944 newspaper column George Orwell made an astute observation: “I would say that the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.” He connected this growing disbelief to the modern cult of power worship. “I do not want the belief in life after death to return,” he added, “and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact.”

I think that one reason we have not taken notice of this fact of the presence of a huge absence (not to say whether this disbelief is “true”) is the internet of speed, celebrated and foreseen by the grandmaster of electronic wizardry and obscurantic celebrator of retribalized man, Marshall McLuhan, who called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve and who argued that the extensions of human faculties through media would bring about abstract persons who would wear their brains outside their skulls and who would need an external conscience. Shall we say robots on fast forward?

Once the human body is reduced to a machine and human intercourse accepted as a “mediated reality” through so-called smart devices, we know – or should – that we are in big trouble. John Ralston Saul, a keen observer of the way we live now, mimics George Carlin by saying, “If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.”

Saul is also one of the few thinkers to follow-up on Orwell’s point. “Inexplicable violence is almost always the sign of deep fears being released and there can be no deeper fear than mortality unchained. With the disappearance of faith and the evaporation of all magic from the image, man’s fear of mortality has been freed to roam in a manner not seen for two millennia.” Blind reason, amoral and in the service of expertise and power, has replaced a holistic approach to understanding that includes at its heart art, language, “spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience.” People, he argues, run around today in an inner panic as if they are searching for a lost forgotten truth.

Zygmunt Bauman, the brilliant sociological thinker, is another observer who has noticed the big hole that is staring us in the face. “The devaluation of immortality,” he writes, “cannot but augur a cultural upheaval, arguably the most decisive turning point in human cultural history.” He too connects our refusal in the west to contemplate this fact to the constant busyness and perpetual rushed sense of emergency engendered by the electronic media with its streaming information. To this end he quotes Nicole Aubert:

Permanent busyness, with one emergency following another, gives the security of a full life or a ‘successful career’, sole proofs of self-assertion in a world from which all references to the ‘beyond’ are absent, and where existence, with its finitude, is the only certainty…When they take action people think short-term – of things to be done immediately or in the very near future…All too often, action is only an escape from the self, a remedy from the anguish.

McLuhan’s abstract persons, who rush through the grey magic of electronic lives where flesh and blood don’t exist, not only drown in excessive data that they can’t understand, but drift through a world of ghostly images where “selves” with nothing at the core flit to and fro. Style, no substance. Perspective, no person. Life, having passed from humans to things and the images of things, reduced and reified. Nothing is clear, the images come and go, fact and fiction blend, myth and history coalesce, time and space collapse in a collage of confusion, surfaces appear as depths, the person becomes a perspective, a perspective becomes a mirror, a mirror reflects an image, and the individual is left dazed and lost, wondering what world he is in and what personality he should don. In McLuhan’s electronic paradise that is ours, people don’t live or die, people just float through the ether and pass away, as do the victims of America’s non-stop wars of aggression simply evaporate as statistics that float down the stream, while the delusional believe the world will bloodlessly evaporate in a nuclear war that they can’t imagine coming and won’t see gone. Who in this flow can hear the words of Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood/A river that goes singing/past the bedrooms…”?

If you shower the public with the thousands of items that occur in the course of a day or a week, the average person, even if he tries hard, will simply retain thousands of items which mean nothing to him. He would need a remarkable memory to tie some event to another that happened three weeks or three months ago….To obtain a rounded picture one would have to do research, but the average person has neither the desire or time for it. As a result, he finds himself in a kind of kaleidoscope in which thousands of unconnected images follow each other rapidly….To the average man who tries to keep informed, a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he cannot understand.

Jaques Ellul wrote that in 1965. Lucid summations are surely needed now.

Here’s one from Roberto Calasso from The Forty-Nine Steps: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.”

Anyone who sits silently and does a modicum of research while honestly contemplating the current world situation will have no trouble in noticing that there is one country in the world – the U.S.A. – that has used nuclear weapons, is modernizing its vast obscene arsenal, and has announced that it will use it as a first strike weapon. A quick glance at a map will reveal the positioning of U.S. NATO troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders and the aggressive movement of U.S. forces close to China. Hiroshima and Nagasaki make no difference. The fate of the earth makes no difference. Nothing makes a difference. Obama started this aggressiveness, but will this change under Trump? That’s very unlikely. We are talking about puppets for the potentates. It’s easy to note that the U.S. has 1,000,000 troops stationed in 175 countries because they advertise that during college basketball games, and of course you know of all the countries upon which the U.S. is raining down death and destruction in the name of peace and freedom. That’s all you need to know. Meditate on that and that hole that has opened up in western culture, and perhaps in your heart.

“If you are acquainted with the principle,” wrote Thoreau, “what do you care for myriad instances and applications?” Simplify, simplify, simplify.

But you may prefer complexity, following the stream.

The snow is still falling, night has descended, and the roads are impassable. The beautiful snow has stopped us in our tracks. Tomorrow we can resume our frantic movements, but for now we must simply stay put and wonder.

Eugene Ionesco, known for his absurdist plays, including Rhinoceros, puts it thus:

In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.

Ionesco emphasized the literal insanity of everyday life, comparing people to rhinoceroses that think and act with a herd mentality because they are afraid of the solitude and slowness necessary for lucid thought. They rush at everything with their horns. Behind this lies the fear of freedom, whose inner core is the fear of death. Doing nothing means being nothing, so being busy means being someone. And today being busy means being “plugged into the stream” of information meant to confound, which it does.

I return to the artist Pasternak, since the snowy night can’t keep me away. Or has he returned to me? I hear Yurii Zhivago’s uncle Nikolai speaking:

Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth. How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it ….What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible to not know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history….Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man – without them he is unthinkable – the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice. Mind you, all of this is still extraordinarily new….Man does not die in a ditch like a dog – but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; he dies sharing in this work. Ouf! I got quite worked up, didn’t I? But I might as well be talking to a blank wall.

I look outside and see the snow has stopped. It is time to sleep. Early tomorrow the plows will grind up the roads and the rush will ensue. Usefulness will flow.

But for now the night is beautiful and slow. A work of art.

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Cybernetics

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